15.1.16

DAVID BOWIE 1947-2016 : AN APPRECIATION

Omnibus Press, of
which I was senior editor, is part of Music Sales, which (until that part of the company was sold to Hal Leonard last year) was Europe’s largest publisher of
printed sheet music. From time to time I was called upon to contribute to this
division of the company and within 24 hours of the death of David Bowie I was asked
to write a tribute to his life and work that would appear in a memorial songbook. I was
delighted to be asked to write it, and I hope I did Bowie justice.

DAVID BOWIE

1947-2016

“I pour out what has already been fed in. I merely
reflect what is going on around me.”

– David Bowie,
July 1973.

David Bowie was the most charismatic popular
musician of his generation, a cultural polymath and style icon whose artistic
breadth also took in theatre, film, video, fashion, mime, fine art, art criticism
and prose writing. Though hugely admired by vast numbers of fans throughout the
world, he often seemed uncomfortable with mainstream recognition and throughout
his long career made a habit of stepping back to experiment with genres of music and cultural expression unlikely
to find commercial acceptance. By refusing to rest on his laurels and – apart
from a misstep in the eighties when he courted the mass market to excess –
recording a series of peerless albums at various times in his life, he
maintained a consistent level of critical acclaim enjoyed by very few of his
contemporaries.

Born David Robert Jones in Brixton in
1947, Bowie paid his dues in a number of groups and guises until his
breakthrough in 1969 with the hit single ‘Space Oddity’, perfectly timed to
coincide with the American moon landing that same year. The song’s theme of
alienation and impending doom would be a recurrent motif of Bowie’s work,
alongside a sense of otherworldliness on the part of its creator, as if David
Bowie really was from another world, an alien being on a higher astral plane
than mere mortals, someone who simply knew more than the rest of us.

The new decade brought a change in his
business affairs with Bowie, perhaps frustrated by his lack of progress after two early albums, abandoning his dependable but old school manager
Kenneth Pitt in favour of the more flamboyant but slightly Machiavellian Tony
De Fries. Together they founded a company called Mainman and staffed it with
colourful characters whose loyalty to David was never in doubt but whose
spending habits would later come back to haunt him. De Fries encouraged his new
client to behave like a star before he actually was one, thus creating an illusion
around Bowie that he was happy to go along with so long as it advanced his
career. It turned out to be a Faustian pact but for the time being everyone was
delighted with the new arrangement and, if nothing else, the Mainman crew certainly
enlivened the London rock scene.

Nevertheless, Bowie’s rise to stardom was not
immediate. Though acclaimed by critics,his 1971 albums The
Man The Who Sold The World, the cover of which saw him in a ‘man’s dress’,
and Hunky Dory sold respectably if
not spectacularly. An instinctive rather than virtuoso musician, Bowie played
saxophone, guitar and keyboards but his greatest skill was in composition and
finding the right collaborators to help realise his songs. During the making of
these records he recruited a key early ally in guitarist Mick Ronson who joined
his stage group shortly before Bowie renamed them The Spiders From Mars, its
leader now restyled as Ziggy Stardust, the ensemble designed to perform his
1972 album named after themselves. This saw lift-off with Bowie as Ziggy,
presenting himself in concert as flamboyantly androgynous, his spiked hair carrot
red, his clothes garish and colourful, outré and revealing, his whole
demeanour screaming ‘star’ from the highest pinnacle.

Ushering in glam rock but always
maintaining a rather aloof presence above the genre’s less cerebral acts like
Slade, Sweet and his friend Marc Bolan’s T. Rex, Bowie’s elaborate costumes
were all part of the same package, in hindsight a work of art in itself.
Consciously or not, everything he did from that point onwards became part of
his art and his life as an artist. Amongst his greatest early achievements,
therefore, was what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror.

Crucially, he represented the outsider,
positioning himself on the side of those ill-suited for conventional society.
His lyrics, often elliptical, spoke to misfits and loners, the timid and the
disconnected, enabling them to cast off inhibitions and paving the way for a
less macho style of rock performer and performance. A skilled interviewee, he
was quick to realise that absolute truth was of less significance that the
effect his words might carry. When he did speak to the press he usually made
headlines, not least in January 1972 when he announced, without foundation[1],
that he was gay or, at the very least, bisexual[2].
Similarly, on a musical level he positioned himself outside the tried and
tested blues rock formula typified by The Rolling Stones or more supercharged
contemporaries like Led Zeppelin, his chief rival during the seventies. While
songs such as ‘The Jean Genie’, ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Rebel Rebel’ certainly
rocked with the best of glam’s full-tilt explosions, others, like ‘Changes’,
‘Life On Mars’ and ‘Starman’, reflected a more ethereal quality, the latter
borrowing Harold Arlen’s octave climb from ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ to
startling effect. ‘Ziggy Stardust’ itself, of course, was assumed to be
autobiographical.

By the end of 1972 Bowie was the
biggest solo rock star in the UK, not to mention the most visually striking and
controversial, and though America’s ingrained conservatism resisted him at
first, the US fell the following year. He
even found time to revive the careers of Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Mott The
Hoople. Aladdin Sane (1973) attracted advance orders of 100,000 in the UK
and was in many ways Ziggy Part II, another huge success, its striking cover of
Bowie as Ziggy with a blue thunderbolt etched across his face solidifying his
surreal image. Then, just as it seemed as if Bowie would eclipse all before
him, he abandoned Ziggy completely, memorably making the announcement from the
stage at Hammersmith Odeon, shocking fans and, so word had it, even his own
group, and returned to the drawing board. It would not be the first time that
Bowie would abruptly spring an unexpected surprise, a career strategy that he maintained until
the very end.

The patchy covers album Pin Ups (1973) was a holding manoeuvre
but with Diamond Dogs (1974), and
perhaps more importantly its concurrent stage show, Bowie invented rock
theatre, a style of presentation that paid no lip service whatsoever to
conventional rock concerts and instead relied purely on dramatic effect and
elaborate stage props. Kate Bush and Madonna took notes. The following year he discovered blue-eyed soul with Young Americans, its funked-up US No. 1
hit single ‘Fame’ a collaboration with John Lennon that savaged his
relationship with manager Tony De Fries. He then stepped back from music to
appear in Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi film The
Man Who Who Fell To Earth. It was astute casting, Bowie’s starring role as
an extra-terrestrial sent to earth to save his own planet serving only to ramp
up the impression of Bowie as a creature from beyond the stratosphere.

Bowie was on a roll though by his own
volition it wasn’t to last. Station To
Station (1976), which merged black funk with the emerging European
electronic school, is widely regarded as his best album ever, as timeless as it
is flawless; yet, after a thrillingly successful world arena tour, it would
presage Bowie’s second retreat from the commercial sphere. Destabilised by a financially calamitous fall out with
De Fries – henceforth he would largely manage his own business affairs in
tandem with lawyers and personal assistant Corinne ‘Coco’ Schwab – and an enervating cocaine
habit, he wisely relocated to Berlin to work with producer/auteur Brian Eno on
a trilogy of introverted experimental albums, thus maintaining his reputation as a genuine innovator and simultaneously avoiding the need to compete with punk rock.
Although many tracks on these now highly acclaimed records were instrumental in
character and perversely uncommercial, the Berlin period produced the stirring
majesty of ‘Heroes’, a meditation on the futility of the Berlin Wall that is
arguably the finest song he ever wrote and certainly the most popular.

After emerging from his German retreat
for another arena tour, Scary Monsters
(1980) saw Bowie move to more conventional ground, its most affecting track
‘Ashes To Ashes’ a revision of the Major Tom saga from ‘Space Oddity’. By this
time videos – short films to promote singles – had arrived and few benefited
more from this development than Bowie whose acting experience gave him the jump
on less imaginative fellow travellers. The video for ‘Ashes To Ashes’, with
Bowie in Pierrot costume, not only lit the touch paper beneath the New Romantic
movement but ushered in an era when he consistently led the field in this new
art form. As if to prove the point, his next move, again unexpected, was to
appear on stage – bravely and with distinction – in Chicago and on Broadway in
New York as the severely deformed John Merrick in The Elephant Man, a role that required him to contort his frame
throughout the play’s duration.

A switch of record labels then saw
Bowie pocket a reputed $17 million advance and move back into the musical
mainstream, this time on his own terms. With EMI’s promotional muscle behind
him, Let’s Dance (1983), produced by
Nile Rodgers, became his best-selling album ever, its funk-driven title track a
big hit with an even bigger hook. He was looking different now too, more mature
and smartly turned out in stylish pastel suits, business-like yet as attractive
as ever, his neatly coiffured blonde hair and easy smile as appealing as the
sheen of Let’s Dance tracks like
‘Modern Love’ and ‘China Girl’. The Serious Moonlight tour that followed saw
Bowie ever more accomplished on stage, his gift for presentation now executed
with effortless panache, a crowd-pleasing spectacle of light, sound, movement
and mime, all to accompany a catalogue of wonderful songs played by top class
musicians led by guitarist Carlos Alomar. It was this vision of Bowie that in
1985 seduced a worldwide audience of millions at Live Aid, his four-song set during Bob Geldof’s all-star charity
extravaganza a highlight of the event and a triumph of mass communication.

The momentum, however, was not to last.
Tonight (1984) failed to match the
sparkle of Let’s Dance, presaging an
artistic decline that lasted for almost a decade, exacerbated by the
disappointing Never Let Me Down
(1987) which in the fullness of time Bowie himself would resoundingly
disparage. The global success of the new
‘normal’ Bowie, and the less-than-radical musical soundtrack that accompanied
this new model, proved to be his undoing. In distancing himself from the
cutting edge, he fell between two stools, alienating both the new and less
critical post-Let’s Dance audience
that recoiled at his theatricality while at the same time disaffecting the more discerning long-term fans who were drawn to his visionary zeal. Matters weren't helped by contractural obligations to a hungry new record label.

Bowie’s solution to this
dilemma was to form a group, Tin Machine, in which he would claim to be ‘just
another member’, an optimistic prospect to say the least. If nothing else the
two heavy handed Tin Machine albums in 1989 and 1991 and subsequent live recording
a year later moved Bowie away from the spotlight to lick his wounds. His
commercial stock was now at its lowest point since before the Ziggy era but he
surprised the world again, not with music but by marrying the Somalian model Iman Mohamed Abdulmajid[3]. Iman clearly inspired the
romanticism of Black Tie White Noise
(1993) and seemed to finally settle Bowie’s restless spirit and curb his
occasional lapses into hedonism.

Thereafter Bowie’s muse would fluctuate across a
series of thoughtful, occasionally acclaimed albums that were never quite as
illustrious as those that preceded them but at the same time restored his
reputation and sustained it for two further decades. There were tours in which he was never less than immaculately turned out, with favourite songs from the past judiciously blended with newer material and,
like many of his peers, he made announcements to the effect that he would no
longer play the hits, only to renege on the pledge a year or two later. How could he not perform songs that had become touchstones in so many lives? Some of
these later records, Earthling (1997)
in particular, were on the experimental side while others, notably hours… (1999) and the enjoyable Heathen (2002), were designed for mass
consumption, as was the less successful Reality
(2003).

To promote Reality
Bowie undertook a huge world tour that stretched from 2003 into 2004 but in June
of ’04 was abruptly cancelled when he suffered heart problems at Scheeßel in Germany. It is understood that he underwent a heart bypass
operation. After surgery, Bowie returned to New York, his home for the past
decade and where he would continue to live in relative seclusion for the
remainder of his life.

From that point on the public was told very little about
what was happening in the world of David Bowie. He stopped giving interviews
around 2006 and his official website remained silent for extended periods. It was reported that he had declined a knighthood. Although he made occasional guest appearances, notably with Arcade Fire, he was
entering a long period of privacy during which rumours about his failing health –
he’d been a heavy smoker for most of his life – proliferated. In the words of
the noted music critic Charles Shaar Murray, we no longer knew who David Bowie
was any more, even if we ever did.

Since presentation was so crucial to Bowie’s craft it is safe to
assume that the reason the world henceforth saw so little of him was because he
could no longer present himself on stage or elsewhere in the manner he would
prefer. Bowie would no sooner appear as a shadow of his former self than
reassume the character of Ziggy Stardust so, rather than appear as someone who
no longer resembled the David Bowie that was universally adored, he chose not
to appear at all. Age, it seemed, was the great leveller, even for David Bowie.
Nevertheless, his absence created a vacuum in which his star continued to shine
brightly: the exhibition of his stage outfits and other memorabilia at London’s
Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013 attracted record crowds and would tour the
world.

That same year Bowie’s
silence was broken dramatically with the unexpected release of The Next Day which took fans and
everyone else completely by surprise. In what in hindsight can be seen as another superb piece of media manipulation, as
impressive as any in his entire career, its unheralded arrival was a front-page
news story in itself, Bowie deriving more publicity by doing absolutely nothing
than top flight acts receive from the massive, not to mention expensive, advance promotion that is the
norm in the 21st Century. A reflective, carefully crafted work, The Next Daywon Bowie the Best British Male Solo Artist at the 2014 Brit
Awards. The model Kate Moss, wearing one of Bowie’s original Ziggy costumes, picked up
the award on his behalf while an enlarged 1973 photo of the real thing, in the
identical costume, looked on from above, arms outstretched and bare legs pinned together as if about to execute a dive into the audience. Best male? No competition, even at 67.

Two years later, on January 8, his 69th
birthday, came the elegiac, brooding Blackstar,
a recording which in hindsight seems to have been deliberately designed as a
requiem. With lyrics that vaguely referenced his rapidly approaching demise, it
will remain a moving, emotional epitaph, intentional in design, a unique and
strangely appropriate climax to an extraordinary life.

David Bowie passed away from cancer of the liver two days
later. He’d evidently been diagnosed 18 months earlier and only a tight circle
of family and friends knew the extent of his illness. Remarkably, it remained a
close secret, so the announcement came as a profound shock to the world and
inspired tributes from the high and mighty, fellow musicians and – most notably
– multitudes of fans for whom David Bowie represented much more than simply a
great rock star but an ideal, a way of life, an incentive to live as you choose
and not be cowed by convention. Within hours of the news, these fans, many of
them with thunderbolts painted on their faces, gathered in their thousands to sing his songs at
locations associated with Bowie’s life and career where hastily erected shrines
spoke far more about his impact on this world than any of the clichés uttered by
the great and the good.

In the second decade of the 21st Century, when
performers from rock and roll’s pioneering era seem to pass away with the
inevitability of the changing seasons, the loss of David Bowie can be compared
only to the deaths of Elvis Presley and John Lennon. “I am not a rock star,” he
would repeatedly tell journalists. He was right. He was much more than that;
untouchable, perhaps comparable to stars in the old Hollywood sense of the
term, perhaps in his daring and ambition beyond compare, shining as brightly as any star
on a cloudless night, truly one of the brightest we shall ever see. He’s up
there now, looking down on us, and maybe, if you glance skywards and catch a
comet flashing across the heavens, you might see David Bowie riding its
fiery slipstream, laughing, singing and waving bye-bye, the prettiest pop star of them
all. “If we sparkle he might land tonight…”

[1] In
May of 1971 his wife Angela, nee Barnett, a Cypriot American model and fashion
designer, produced their son whom they named Zowie. In the fullness of time he
would alter his name to Duncan Jones. Angie and Bowie separated in the
mid-seventies and were divorced in 1980.

[2]
True or not, in the opinion of my friend Michael Watts, who conducted the
interview for Melody Maker, this
statement “changed the lifestyles of a generation and kick-started the LGBT
movement”.

[3]
Iman gave birth to their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones, known as Lexi, on 15
August, 2000.

Dear Chris, you've surpassed yourself! Beautiful and fitting obituary (despite it causing an onslaught of fresh tears). I just finished re-reading "The Archive" (1987 re-issue) and want to thank you so much for your thorough research and beautiful portrayal of David Bowie. Your last paragraph in that book was truly prophetic (see p.83). With sincere appreciation, Jane Hind.